Obama, the Prequel

An origin story.

Genevieve Cook and Obama in 1984, at her stepfather’s house in Connecticut.Credit Photograph Courtesy Simon & Schuster

One night in November of 1935, a flashy swing-band singer named Beach Powers, twenty-three, was driving down a lonesome stretch of Route 54, about ten miles outside Eureka, Kansas, with Claude Forshee, twenty-one, and their dates, the fifteen-year-old twins Evelyn and Dorothy Coolscott. They were on their way to El Dorado to see a movie. (The dreamiest show in cinemas that season was “Top Hat,” in which Fred Astaire sings “Dancing Cheek to Cheek” to Ginger Rogers.) A cow wandered into the road. Powers swerved to avoid it, only to crash into a tanker truck filled with gasoline. The truckdriver, and everyone in the car, burned to death.

Someone else was supposed to be in that car that night, seventeen-year-old Stanley Dunham, but his grandmother had made him stay home. Every family has a chancy cow or two roaming the meadows of its past. The reason that anyone other than the Dunhams knows the story of this particular stray has to do with what happened a lifetime later, on November 4, 2008, when Stanley Dunham’s grandson was elected President of the United States.

Barack Obama’s grandfather Stanley Dunham was born in Wichita in 1918. He was named after Henry Morton Stanley, a Welshman who immigrated to the United States and fought in the Civil War—first with the Confederate Army and then, switching sides, with the U.S. Navy, before he deserted—and who, in 1869, was assigned by the New York Herald to find David Livingstone, a Scottish missionary thought to be lost in Africa. As the story goes, when Stanley found his man in 1871, near Lake Tanganyika, he said, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

In 1896, six years after Henry Morton Stanley published his last book, “In Darkest Africa,” Obama Opiyo, a prominent man in the village of Kanyadhiang, in western Kenya, had a son, Onyango Obama, by one of his five wives. As a boy, Onyango went to a missionary school run by Seventh-Day Adventists, where he learned to read and write English. When he grew up, he converted to Islam and took the name Hussein. In 1933, Hussein Onyango purchased his fourth wife, Akumu, for the price of perhaps thirty-five cows. Akumu’s second child, Barack Hussein Obama, was born in 1934, the year before a cow wandered onto Route 54 outside Eureka, Kansas, failing to take the life of Stanley Dunham, and about the time that a Dutchman and ten Luo men, not including Hussein Onyango, had a deadly encounter with the hippos they were hunting in Lake Victoria, a body of water that Henry Morton Stanley had once circumnavigated.

Meanwhile, back in Kansas Stanley Dunham, whose grandmother didn’t often manage to keep him home, eloped with Madelyn Lee Payne on the night of her senior prom, in 1940. During the Second World War, Stanley Dunham enlisted in the U.S. Army; Hussein Onyango took a job as a cook for the British in Nairobi; and Madelyn Dunham worked at Boeing, making B-29s in Wichita. Before Stanley was sent to Europe, he trained Stateside for a spell, and in November of 1942 Madelyn had a baby. She named her Stanley Ann, because Stanley was her husband’s name, and because in the summer of 1942 she had seen Bette Davis play a woman named Stanley in a movie called “In This Our Life.” (In the film, directed by John Huston, Davis’s character, a remorseless villain, kills a child while driving drunk and then blames the son of the family’s maid, a young black man who aspires to be a lawyer. In the closing scene, Stanley, pursued by the police, loses control of her speeding car and dies when it careers off the road, crashes, and goes up in flames.)

Years passed. Many improbable things happened, some of them historic. And then, on September 26, 1960, the day of the first Nixon-Kennedy debate, seventeen-year-old Stanley Ann Dunham, of Wichita, Kansas, met twenty-six-year-old Barack Hussein Obama, of Kanyadhiang, Kenya, in Elementary Russian 101, at the University of Hawaii. By Election Day, she was pregnant. They married on February 2, 1961, in the Wailuku County courthouse. In twenty-one states, that marriage would have been illegal—a violation of miscegenation laws. As recorded on a birth certificate, which you can find at whitehouse.gov, because so many people have demanded to see it, Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961, at the Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital, in Honolulu, at 7:24 P.M.

If you tell a life backward, it’ll have the contingency of “How I Met Your Mother” and the inevitability of “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.” This will make it seem at once unlikely and foreordained, and much more so, on both counts, if your subject is the President of the United States. It’s a pickle. “I believe that life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences,” David Maraniss writes in “Barack Obama: The Story” (Simon & Schuster), “yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder.” Maraniss is an editor at the Washington Post. His research took him around the world. He interviewed hundreds of people and made many remarkable discoveries. His six-hundred-page book is full of riveting stories, shrewd observations, and fascinating details. It’s like reading Michener.

After the war, the Dunhams bounced around. First they went to California, and Stanley studied at Berkeley. Then they went to Oklahoma. After a while, they settled east of Seattle, where Stanley sold furniture. They moved to Hawaii in the summer of 1960, just after Stanley Ann graduated from high school, and not long after Hawaii became part of the United States. In 1957, when Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., was working in Nairobi as a clerk, he eloped with a schoolgirl named Kezia, and had two children with her; meanwhile, he studied, and pondered the relationship between Kenya and Britain. In 1959, while working with Betty Mooney, an American missionary, he wrote a book called “Otieno Jarieko,” a Luo primer, printed for the Kenyan Department of Education; it was with Mooney’s encouragement that Obama applied to and was accepted by the University of Hawaii, and joined the first of a generation of Kenyans to be educated in the United States.

This, in Maraniss’s account, is another happenstance. “The Westernization of the Obamas began a generation earlier, when Seventh-Day Adventist missionaries encountered Onyango in Kendu Bay, taught him English, and introduced him to European clothing and culture,” Maraniss writes, and “the family’s rise was furthered in the next generation when his son, Barack, happened upon a woman from the United States who was sent to Kenya to spread the twin gospels of literacy and the Lord.” It’s a case in point: “That is how history works, the history of families as well as the history of nations and movements. Along with the rational processes of biology and geography, of politics and economics, there come seemingly random connections that spin out profound and unintended consequences.”

There is something quite searching and wonderful about seeing much of history as a chaos of chance. It has a few pitfalls, however. One is that it renders brutality, as a driver of the course of human events, hard to see and even harder to gauge. Politics and economics appear in Maraniss’s account, in carefully researched detail: slavery and abolition, Jim Crow and civil rights in the United States, and colonialism, imperialism, and anti-colonialism in Kenya and Indonesia. But they can seem like richly painted stage cloth. Another difficulty is that telling the story of the President’s ancestors to explain how the President became the President is a teleological project, and a teleologist who embraces randomness is in some danger of finding himself unable to decide which details to include and which to leave out. In the nineteen-fifties, Barack Obama, Sr., bumped into many people who, unlike Betty Mooney, didn’t send him down a path that led to Elementary Russian 101. A teleological narrative requires leaving them out, which Maraniss generally does. (All biography is teleological, to one degree or another, which is a problem, but a knowable one.)

At other times, he makes odder choices. Stanley Dunham’s troubled mother, Ruth Armour Dunham, committed suicide in 1926, when she was twenty-six. She swallowed ten grams of strychnine and left a note, explaining that she was killing herself because her husband no longer loved her. Stanley was eight, and his brother, Ralph, Jr., was ten. (Stanley told his grandson that he found the body; Maraniss, sleuthing, says that’s impossible.) Stanley Dunham died in 1992, but Maraniss was able to interview his brother. “It was while playing Uncle Wiggily, as Ralph Jr. remembered it,” Maraniss reports, “that he and Stanley were told their mother was dead.” It’s a striking detail; the dissonance is an agony. It also tells us something about the man who would one day raise a boy who would one day become President. But it’s buried in a paragraph in which Maraniss explains that the boys had bought the board game at a drugstore; that they had paid for it with money their grandparents had given them; that it was manufactured by the Milton Bradley Company; and that it was based on a series of books, which Stanley and his brother had read, about a “lame old rabbit with the striped barber-pole cane, and his cast of creature friends and enemies, the Skeezicks, Bushy Bear, Woozy Wolf, Jimmie Wibblewobble, and Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy.” Wiggily was plenty.

Returning to that road accident on Route 54 in 1935, when “Top Hat” was playing in Topeka, Maraniss deduces what might be called the stray-cow theory of history. “The genealogy of any family involves countless what-if moments,” he writes. “Here was one in the line of generations leading out from Stanley Dunham, the what-if of a less insistent grandmother, a disoriented cow, and the teenage Stanley immolated on a roadway in Kansas.” It’s a very interesting theory. It also, as Maraniss’s choice of words suggests, has as much to do with genealogy as with biography.

Genealogy is among the fastest-growing hobbies in America. Ancestry.com, the largest Internet provider of family records, began posting documents, like wills and censuses and birth certificates, in 1996. The service, which provides online access to more than ten billion records, currently attracts nearly two million subscribers. It’s Facebook for the dead.

In monarchies, genealogy, obviously, means a great deal; lineage determines political authority. In the United States, genealogy, as a hobby, has waxed and waned, but pedigree has never been a national project. In American politics, being self-made is better than being an heir; coming from nothing is worth more than coming from something. It’s not that Presidential biographers have never traced anyone’s ancestry; it’s that most haven’t made that much of it, and the canniest of them have made a point of mocking it. “None of Mr. Lincoln’s family seems to have been aware of the preciousness of long pedigrees,” William Dean Howells remarked, in his “Life of Abraham Lincoln.” By which he meant: ancestry is for aristocrats; in a democracy, it’s bunk. Lincoln’s grandfather could have been just about anybody, for all Howells thought anyone needed to know or care. Except that he couldn’t have been black.

No American’s ancestry has been the subject of more scrutiny than Barack Obama’s, and, for that reason, few American Presidents have had more of an effect on the writing of Presidential biography. The scrutiny began with self-searching, in Obama’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.” And then, during the 2008 Presidential campaign, it plummeted into absurdity with the charge that the Democratic candidate was not a U.S. citizen. Before the release of the “long-form” birth certificate, last year, a Gallup poll found that more than two in five Republicans believed that the President was either definitely or probably born in another country. After the release of the birth certificate, a follow-up poll found that nearly one in four still believed that to be the case. Maraniss, then, is embracing the beauty and, in a way, the innocence of randomness partly as a way of battling what he calls “strange armies of ideological pseudo-historians” who have researched Barack Obama’s origins in order to argue some or all of the following: that he is not an American citizen, that he was born in Nairobi, that he was educated at a madrassa in Jakarta, that he is a Muslim, that he is a Kenyan nationalist, and that he is an anti-imperialist and a socialist.

The last of these positions is taken by Dinesh D’Souza in “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” which is the basis for his forthcoming documentary “2016.” D’Souza argues that the President of the United States is his father, reincarnated, and that Obama even “took his father’s name in order to cement his explicit identification with him.”

Weird stuff happens. What does it mean? Making a man responsible for the name his parents gave him the day he was born is a good illustration of the consequence of embracing a theory of history in which nothing is chaos and everything is conspiracy. Given a choice between a chaotic theory of history and a conspiratorial one, I’ll take chaos. Still, there are other choices. You could chalk things up to fate: blame Providence. Or you could get empirical: employ social science. Historians who study the movements of populations, the flow of ideas, the traffic in goods, the barter of culture, and even the rhythms of nature find explanation in structures, in order. In biography, order is to be found in the journey of life; in genealogy, in lines of descent. In biography, the boy is father of the man. In genealogy, the boy is a leaf on a branch of his family’s tree. Marry chaos to biography and we live in a world of wonder and innocence. Marry conspiracy to genealogy and we live in a world of unending inequality, in which our origins are inescapable.

Barack Obama barely knew his father. “He had left Hawaii back in 1963, when I was only two years old,” Obama wrote in “Dreams.” This isn’t quite true, as Maraniss points out. (By no means does Maraniss believe only in chaos. He has a passion for chance, but also a belief in order and a commitment to evidence.) Barack Obama’s father actually left Hawaii in June of 1962—he went to Harvard, to enroll in a Ph.D. program in economics—and his mother left nearly a year earlier, in August of 1961, taking her baby with her to Seattle when the baby was less than a month old, so that she could study at the University of Washington. Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama, Sr., never lived together, and were divorced in March of 1964.

That spring, the Boston office of the I.N.S. refused to renew Obama, Sr.,’s visa; the file mentions that officials at Harvard “couldn’t seem to figure out how many wives he had.” He left the country that summer, and was soon joined by an elementary-school teacher from Newton named Ruth Baker, who married him in Nairobi, in December of 1964. The following year, Stanley Ann Obama, who had moved back to Honolulu, married an Indonesian student named Soetoro Martodihardjo, who went by the name Lolo Soetoro. She graduated with a B.A. in anthropology in August of 1967, and then flew with her six-year-old son to Jakarta, on the island of Java, to be with her new husband, in another country that was in the process of remaking itself, having thrown off colonial rule. She had a daughter, Maya, in 1970 and, the next year, sent her son back to Hawaii to live with her parents and attend Punahou, a prestigious prep school founded by missionaries.

Barack Obama did not meet his father until he was ten years old and just starting fifth grade at his new school in Hawaii. In 1971, the elder Obama flew from Kenya and stayed in a guest apartment in Stanley and Madelyn Dunham’s apartment building. His visit lasted only a matter of weeks. After that, the boy never saw his father again. Nevertheless, according to D’Souza he has, for his entire life, been animated by his father’s unrealized ambition to avenge the colonized peoples of the world by destroying the United States. The White House is haunted by the ghost of Hussein Onyango’s son: “The most powerful country in the world,” D’Souza writes, darkly, “is being governed according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.” Inheritance is destiny.

Obama began “Dreams from My Father” with this sentence: “A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news.” He was in his apartment in New York, on Ninety-fourth Street, making breakfast, when the phone rang:

“Barry? Barry, is this you?”

“Yes . . . Who’s this?”

“Yes, Barry . . . this is your Aunt Jane. In Nairobi. Can you hear me?”

“I’m sorry—who did you say you were?”

“Aunt Jane. Listen, Barry, your father is dead.”

And that’s how his story of inheritance begins: “I sat down on the couch, smelling eggs burn in the kitchen, staring at cracks in the plaster, trying to measure my loss.”

Barack Obama, Sr., had been driving along a stretch of road, bordered by sunflowers, between Kenyatta National Hospital and Mawenzi Gardens, when he lost control of his car and drove into a pole. Maraniss doesn’t get to Obama’s father’s death until page 413. “Dreams” is a coming-of-age story. In Maraniss’s book, Obama never comes of age, not even by the last page, when he’s twenty-seven, and about to start Harvard Law School. Maraniss is biding his time, Robert Caro-style, but he’s up to something else, too. “There are certain tendencies and recurring themes from Obama’s history that help explain his presidency,” he writes—everything in this book is meant to foretell—and these began in his family’s past, long ago.

The splashiest parts of Maraniss’s book, some of which appeared in a much discussed excerpt published in the June issue of Vanity Fair, cover Obama’s years as a teen-ager and as a young man. In high school, in Hawaii, he read Baldwin and Ellison and staged debates and smoked pot and played basketball. “Good luck in everything you do, and get that law degree,” he wrote in a friend’s senior yearbook. “Some day when I am an all-pro basketballer, and I want to sue my team for more money, I’ll call on you.”

In 1979, he went to Occidental College, where he perfected his impression of Mick Jagger and published a poem titled “Pop” in a student literary magazine called Feast. It begins:

Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken

In, sprinkled with ashes,

Pop switches channels, takes another

Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks,

What to do with me, a green young man

Who fails to consider the

Flim and flam of the world, since

Things have been easy for me.

He wanted to be a writer. He wanted to live in a writer’s city. He transferred to Columbia and started a long-distance relationship with Alex McNear, one of the editors of Feast. He wrote the usual wobbly and sometimes wonderful but always frighteningly self-conscious stuff that smart, driven kids write in college. “I haven’t read The Wasteland for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes,” he wrote in a letter to McNear, around the time he was taking a class with Edward Said. “But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Munzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak.”

Much of this, like most of the genre to which it belongs, kept in boxes in the bottom of our closets, is quite painful to read. The boy version is braced with bluster (“You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?”), the girl’s flooded with feeling. Genevieve Cook met Obama at the end of December of 1983. Obama, in his autobiography, does not reveal her name; Maraniss describes their time together as “the deepest romantic relationship of his young life.” She kept a diary:

January 10, 1984

Wonder where it will go with Barack. . . .

January 22

What a startling person Barack is—so strange to voice intimations of my own perceptions—have them heard, responded to so on the sleeve. A sadness, in a way, that we are both so questioning that original bliss is dissipated—but feels really good not to be faltering behind some façade. . . .

February 19

Despite Barack’s having talked of drawing a circle around the tender in him—protecting the ability to feel innocence and springborn—I think he also fights against showing it to others, to me.

They slept together for more than a year, and for a while they lived together. She found his remoteness infuriating:

February 4, 1985

Who is this boy/man/person, Barack Obama? . . . I find now that questions of who he is reflect back on myself. . . . Some sense of the veiled withholding that I still feel flutters between us—constantly respun from both our ends.

By May, it was over. That summer, he moved to Chicago.

Not long after that, Obama’s half sister Auma, one of Kezia’s children, visited him in Chicago. After she left, he decided to go to Kenya, to meet the rest of his family, and wrestle with the story of his origins.

Maraniss follows Obama to Africa for only a few short pages. “Obama had come to Kenya hoping to put all the pieces of his shattered genealogy back together again,” he writes. But what Obama did in Kenya, at least as he writes about it in “Dreams,” was to try to measure the distance between what he had inherited and who he wanted to be. (“Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order,” as the young Obama put it, he chooses . . . change.) Putting the pieces of his “shattered genealogy” back together again was not so much Obama’s project as it is Maraniss’s.

In “Dreams,” Obama writes about discovering that his father was a fierce and brutal man who tried to drink away his disappointments. (He also beat Ruth, and Maraniss’s evidence suggests that he may have beaten Stanley Ann, too.) He calls his father the Old Man. The Old Man, Auma tells him, “came back here thinking that because he was so educated and spoke his proper English and understood his charts and graphs everyone would somehow put him in charge. He forgot what holds everything together here”—kinship. “He was lost,” Obama says.

Kinship is not what holds everything together in the United States, at least as far as the national myth would have it, or used to have it, before a baby born in the Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital, in Honolulu, at 7:24 P.M. on August 4, 1961, derailed that story. Washington rides his horse. Jackson charges into battle. Lincoln fells trees. Kennedy fells Nixon. Obama goes to Kenya. What Obama offered in “Dreams,” and promised, during his campaign, was a different notion of becoming: the inheritance, and then the transcendence, of race. He meant that as an allegory for America. “I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas,” he said in 2008. “I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”

Back in Chicago, working on the South Side, watching black kids growing up edgy and angry, he wished he could ask the Old Man “just what it is that we’ve done to make so many children’s hearts so hard.”

That wasn’t his father’s question or, for that matter, his mother’s. Nor was it a question either of them could have answered. Nor has their son, who is lost in a story no longer of his own making. It’s still a good question, though. ♦

Jill Lepore, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2005.